Surveillance Pricing: How to Stop Overpaying
Original: How to Beat Surveillance Pricing Before It Bleeds You Dry
Why This Matters
AI-driven personalized pricing is scaling fast; understanding the mechanics is the first line of consumer defense.
Consumer advocate Lindsay Owens's new book 'Gouged' details how corporations use software, loyalty apps, and algorithmic pricing to extract maximum spend from consumers. Owens, CEO of DC think tank Groundwork Collaborative and former Warren adviser, warns generative AI will worsen the problem.
Fixed prices have been a retail norm since John Wanamaker first put price tags on department store goods in late-1800s Philadelphia. That norm is now under serious pressure. Lindsay Owens, CEO of watchdog think tank Groundwork Collaborative and former economic policy adviser in Senator Elizabeth Warren's office, argues in her new book 'Gouged: The End of a Fair Price and What That Means for Your Wallet' that technology — not greed alone — has turbocharged corporate price extraction.
Owens points to loyalty apps as a prime example. What consumers treat as a fair exchange (data for discounts) has quietly flipped. She cites a 2004 Duke economist Curtis Taylor paper that predicted exactly this outcome: once firms can buy and sell purchase records, they identify their most eager customers and charge them more. One concrete illustration from the WIRED interview — a McDonald's app data request that produced a 515-page dossier estimating a zero percent chance the user would ever stop being a customer. That data is used against you, not for you.
Algorithmically adjusted prices compound this. Real-time pricing software means the number you see is increasingly personal, not universal. Owens warns that generative AI will make these tools sharper and more opaque. Her book includes practical tips for consumers looking to claw back leverage — though the structural imbalance, she suggests, runs deeper than any individual hack can fully address.